Help Khan Academy this holiday season

Hi everyone,

Sal Khan here from Khan Academy, and I just want to first of all express my gratitude to all of you who have supported Khan Academy over the years. I also wanted to reach out to those of y'all who haven't, because as you know, we are not-for-profit with a mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. It wouldn't be possible without donations from folks like yourself.

As I tell folks, we are an organization with a budget of about a large high school, but our goal is literally free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere; to be an institution that can serve billions of people for generations. As important as Khan Academy was during the pandemic, at the peak of the pandemic, we saw our usage go from 30 million learning minutes a day to almost 90 million learning minutes.

As we know, the post-pandemic period that we are hopefully entering into now is the period where we really need to make sure that students all over the country in the U.S. and all over the world have the opportunity to finish their unfinished learning and accelerate to where they need to go.

What you're going to see with your support, if we're able to get it, is a lot of really cool innovations over the coming years. We are continuing to expand the content that we offer. Many folks know us for our math videos; they don't realize we have a full mastery-based math exercise framework that starts in pre-K with Khan Academy Kids and goes all the way to calculus and statistics and beyond.

We are doing a big push in science—all of the sciences in middle school and high school and early college. We would like, if we get the resources, to do a push in English and language arts. We're going to be doing a push in civics. We're going to think about how we can personalize things better for students, really start to emulate what a good tutor would do for them.

At the same time, how can we better assist teachers inside of classrooms? Classrooms are where we think we're going to make huge gains. An efficacy study just came out; it's one of over 550 efficacy studies on Khan Academy that if students are able to put in even 30 to 60 minutes a week—not per day, per week—it's going to accelerate them 20, 30, 40 percent more than pre-pandemic norms.

During the pandemic, most students saw a decline. This efficacy study was run during the pandemic on 8th graders, which is actually where you normally see the biggest decline; they saw a 40 percent acceleration. And that's once again with 30 to 60 minutes a week, or about 18 hours over the course of a whole school year.

So if you're a big believer in serving folks all over the world, helping them reach their potential, if you're a user of Khan Academy, and if you would like to see us build out our content, build out our engagement, build out our efficacy, and even more, make it possible so that work on Khan Academy can lead to high school and college credit.

We have a pilot with Howard University right now where students in Title 1 high schools get mastery in college algebra on Khan Academy, take the Howard midterm and final, and are getting transferable college algebra credit. We want to expand that to more subjects and more grades.

So as you can see, the journey at Khan Academy, as far as we have gone—the tens or hundreds of millions that we've already served—our aspirations are much, much bigger. We want to be the safety net education system for the world, and ideally, when students do have great school environments to be in, we hope to supercharge it to allow more personalization so that every student can reach their potential.

Thank you.